I was walking my dog when the thought arrived — that Hayao Miyazaki’s films are a love letter to ordinary women.
In Nausicaä, we see a little girl who believes in the friendly intent of nature, standing between her people and a seemingly hostile world, establishing peace through sacrificing herself for the things she loves. Similarly, in Spirited Away, Chihiro takes care of her family and her friends, starting as a person who doesn’t care much about anything but herself. She is a child, after all — moving from one city to another, new school and so on. Why would you expect any different? But then she grows through hard labor and a bunch of obstacles. She demonstrates care for people you wouldn’t expect her to care about — Lin, the girl she met in the bathhouse who became her friend, then even Yubaba’s baby, then Haku. They were all a little hostile towards her at first, and still that pulling desire to help, to save the day.
In Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie takes care of Howl, who at first seems like a child in a grown man’s body — vain, dramatic, falling apart over a grey hair. But Sophie just tends to things. The house. The people in it. Small acts, one after another. And somehow, without any announcement, that changes everything.
In Totoro, we have a similar picture where a little girl holds the household together in a family pulled apart — her mother is sick, they’ve moved to a different place, finding new friends and so on.
For a long time those movies were a way for me to express gratitude for how much regular women hold the world together behind the curtain, staying in the shadows. It’s usually not an epic story you would hear as a legend — not Iliad and Odyssey sort of stuff. You don’t hear much about that routine, everyday, work-your-way kind of action.
Then I started wondering. Most popular stories — Bushido, samurai, the warrior mythology — are built around ultimate self-sacrifice, annihilation, a supernova explosion, or the endurance of a melting shield under the dragon’s flames. The story that ends in ashes or glory and gets remembered in monuments.
And Miyazaki keeps asking: what about everything else? Those dragon slayers still need to eat, right? Someone cooked that meal. Someone tended the wound when they came back, or carried the grief when they didn’t. Someone kept the children alive through the winter. None of that makes the legend.
Life is different though. It keeps the chaos of the night behind the closed door, night after night. It brings food to the table day after day. It sings and dances in joy from small things. The dragons are real, but they are rare. The closed door, the meal, the song — that is every day.
That is what Miyazaki keeps returning to.
His male characters work the same way. Kamaji in Spirited Away never leaves his furnace — six arms keeping the bathhouse running, invisible to everyone above him. Tatsuo in Totoro holds his daughters with quiet steadiness while their mother is in the hospital. Not performing strength, just present.
Not warriors. Craftsmen, fathers. Maintaining the world in a different way.
If you think about it, it’s just a story about regular life. About men and women. For a very, very long time — almost our whole existence — we lived that way, where everyone suffered a lot and everyone did their part. Someone stayed home, cooking and keeping things together. Someone went to the field for hard labor, or went hunting and might never come back. Child mortality was brutal. Real stories about regular people. The heroism of persistence. The happiness of supporting each other. That’s why they resonate at that deeper level, where the fairy tale at the surface somehow makes you feel part of the story.
Thank you for being alongside me